Hi folks,
We’re back with another episode, and we have a guest I think you’ll like.
We found it a bit hard to talk about Turkish politics on its own though, since once again, crazy Americans are sucking up the world’s attention.
Donald Trump has unleashed a flurry of executive actions that seem to be very illegal, but he’s doing it so fast and on such a large scale that the courts can’t really keep up with him.
I don’t know if it’s going to work, but it appears to be designed to create a super-executive that can rule the U.S. Federal government like a CEO would a large corporation.
We’re not strangers to this idea in Turkey.
Erdoğan got there in a different way, but had a similar goal. In the 2010s, he took a series of steps that yielded a super-presidency, tailored to his exact measurements. Since then, he has been recreating the state apparatus one office at a time. His reach is now going deeper and deeper into the political opposition.
To talk about all that, we had Burak Bilgehan Özpek with us on the podcast. Burak is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the TOBB University. He’s very well known in Ankara as someone who is very measured in his assessment of the political situation in Turkey. He’s also intimately familiar with the ins and outs of opposition politics.
In the first half of the episode, we talked about Turkey’s regime change in more theoretical terms: the way that institutions are always lagging behind political norms, what constitutes a crime in such a system, how the executive molds the opposition to his designs, etc.
In the second part of the podcast (for paid subscribers) we ask Burak more detailed questions about the state of the opposition, and discuss what kinds of strategies they need to adopt in this kind of environment.
This episode is on the longer side, and we covered a lot of ground. Do send us your comments and/or questions!
All the best,
Selim
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